Nobody grows up in Boca Raton. You move down from New York, grow old and eventually kick the bucket in the mouth of the rat. The locals have been known to jokingly call the renown retirement community “God’s Waiting Room”. Boca is a palm tree laden paradise where you can enjoy the rest of your days in warmth, eat way too early / way too much and play countless rounds of golf all year round. Popular TV shows like Seinfeld and The Sopranos, along with every joke ever made about where older people from the Northeast go during the winter, have solidified Boca as America’s retirement mecca. Like I said, nobody grows up in Boca Raton. Except for me.
Spending my formative and adolescence years in South Florida was an amazing experience. Indeed, most of my time was spent in a subtropical haven of sunshine and happiness. I belonged to a overly loving dual-income upper-middle class family, received a stellar public school education and, as a bonus, got to hang out with my grandparents all the time. In fact, I got to hang out with everyone’s grandparents all the time. Truly, almost every meal I had growing up involved an American history lesson or a call back to The Big Apple. Why watch Band of Brothers on HBO when you can simply experience the harshness of WWII over stacked-high pastrami and rye? I might as well have grown up in Manhattan during the 1940s.
However, there’s another side to Boca as well. The one that’s all glitz and glam. According to Forbes, Boca Raton has three of the ten most expensive gated communities in the U.S. It’s why my wife’s family and friends “endearingly” call me a “Boca Boy”. I get it. Growing up in a town like Boca must mean I come from money. I do not. After all, the town’s median per-capita income is more than double the median income for the rest of the state. BMWs and Mercedes might as well be Kias and Toyotas given the number of exotic cars driving up and down our “mean” streets of gated communities and high-end shopping centers. Ugh, another Maserati?! Let me know when you see a Lambo or Ferrari.
It’s a bit ironic then (or maybe it makes perfect sense) that I would become a financial planner for high-achieving Millennials in New York City. Looking back, it’s easy to make the connection upon realizing that your childhood environment was inundated by both retirees and wealth. I didn’t know it at the time, but readily available to me were countless living case studies on how wealth is both built and kept. Conversely, I also had easy access to a litany of cautionary tales of how wealth can be lost or squandered, which was often found in the regretful eyes of those retirees who experienced it firsthand.
So, what financial lessons did I learn from growing up in Boca Raton?
For starters, I learned a lot about what it takes to achieve a sound retirement or, as we Millennials like to call it, financial independence. My generation can complain that we don’t have a social safety net or financial guarantees like our grandparents have/had, but I’d quickly point out that we didn’t need to make incredible sacrifices like they did. Yes, today’s financial landscape might be more challenging, but they did the unimaginable so that we can freely post whatever it is we want to our Instagram stories.
And while we experienced the economic ferociousness of The Great Recession at a formative time in our lives, we’d be foolish to compare that to what they experienced in growing up during/after The Great Depression. If I learned anything from constantly getting my cheeks pinched by legions of bubbies and pop-pops, it’s that hard work and sacrifice pays one heck of a dividend.
Secondly, I learned that if you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself swept up in your surroundings, especially when living in an unrealistic bubble of wealth. My wife likes to observe that many people from my hometown are “all flash and no cash”, meaning that for all the flossing and flaunting they do, there’s very little of substance behind it. She’s got a good point. Constantly being surrounded by opulence sets unrealistic expectations as what it takes to actually achieve and maintain some of the fancy lifestyles on display. For example, walking around Town Center mall in early 2009 might have convinced you that the economy wasn’t all that bad when, in fact, things were pretty terrible.
There’s a lot more lessons from Boca where that came from, but if you ask me, these two alone pack quite the punch. If you simply work hard and don’t get caught up with what everyone else is doing, you can greatly increase your chances of achieving your own financial goals (i.e. retirement). Working hard and remaining focused might eventually afford you the ability to do what you want with your time instead of having to spend it working a job you don’t like or doing things you wish you didn’t need to do.
In a strange way, growing up in Boca instilled these very important financial lessons in me. Lessons that I now get to share with my generation so that hopefully, we too, can someday bask in the warmth of our own version of Del Boca Vista.
This is a real place.